Monday, April 21, 2008

It's Bad When You Forget Your Own...

1. One change you have made in the past year to tread a little lighter on the Earth2. Your favorite color(s)

by April 30 to win an "Organic Nettie Kit" (enough organic cotton yarn to make a Nettie bag). Open to US and Canadian residents. (I just don't trust the mails any farther than that!) Winner will be chosen at random on May 1.

Happy Blogiversary!I have planted a garden, started a compost pile and forced...erm, encouraged my husband to recycle. I am still working on the bring bags to grocerystore bit, but hopefully that will take effect soon :-)

The store where we buy our produce always packages it in styrofoam trays, rather than just throwing them away, I wash them and reuse them for all kinds of great stuff. The ones with the lettuce make great "plates", we use them for dishes and bowls when we are camping, we use them for when my daughter and I paint too.

In the past year I, too, have started using fabric bags at stores. In addition to the benefit to the earth, I think it's fun to see the look on the faces of the Target staff when you hand the the canvas bag. :) We also got rid of one car (well, it died, but we didn't replace it) which makes us think more about when and where we drive and, consequently, we drive less.

1. We exclusively use our own bags at all the stores we shop at, including department/specialty stores. Changed light bulbs to energy saving ones. Bought a timer for the shower to help us reduce water waste. Lowered the thermostat this winter and the water heater temp. Plan all car drives for chores to include as many as possible on on trip to save on gas since we live far from everything.

Happy blogiversary! 1. like many others, trying to be better about bringing my own bags to the store (we also switched out at least half of the lights-mostly the most used- to compact flourescents) 2. earthy colors (olives, greens, ochrey yellows, oranges, deep reds, rich browns) but I love to look at sea colors too (deep blues/greens) and a splash of deep pink now and then is good too...

1. We have a bunch of bags for grocery shopping, and we recycle everything possible. The biggest change I've done this year is to bring clean containers to the food fair when I go there for lunch -- I've saved TONS of takeout containers this year.

I have started using my local Freecycle.org this past year. People post what they want to give away or what they are looking for -- and it all finds a new home that is not the county dump! I tend to post things that are looking for a new home most of the time.